The Ole Miss athletic facility plan, called Forward Together, will include construction of this 10,000-seat basketball arena to replace the outdated Tad Smith Coliseum, which opened in 1966.Rendering courtesy Ole Miss Athletics

I spent most of Tuesday in Oxford, Miss., working on a handful of fronts. You'll see a feature as early as Sunday on an Ole Miss football walk-on who has an amazing personal story.

While in Lafayette County, I spent some time in athletic director Ross Bjork's office talking about money. Not his money, though he has more of it now, but Ole Miss's money. Specifically, the progress the school has made on the fundraising campaign he inherited from predecessor Pete Boone -- the Forward Together campaign, with its $150 million goal.

It stands at $81 million in pledges and cash, Bjork said. A year ago, that number was $62 million.

"We've gained some momentum," Bjork said. "We've got a lot of good gifts that have come in. Just in the past couple of weeks we had two $250,000 gifts. We had the largest gift in our history last fall of $3.7 million. We had another million-dollar gift last fall, as well, from the Lloyd family." Bjork said there are significant discussions in "the pipeline" for more gifts. "Seven-figure type gifts," he said. "Now it's our job to close on those gifts."

But what of basketball specifically? A new arena is part of this fundraising campaign, and the team that would occupy it just enjoyed its first NCAA tournament trip in 11 years and scored a first-round win, to boot. Just last month, Jeff Amy of the Associated Press in Jackson, Miss., reported that the governing body of the state's college system approved plans for Ole Miss to hire AECOM, at the price of $6 million, to design the new facility.

"I think there will be a lot more momentum when we announce the exact location of the arena," Bjork said. "When we announce the exact design and what it looks like and how it ties in to our game day experience for a football game day and a basketball game day, and how it ties into our campus on a daily basis."

It is yet unclear what the arena will cost. According to the fundraising campaign's website, Ole Miss has raised $14 million of a $20 million goal associated with basketball seat agreements and has raised nearly $18 million of a $50 million goal in philanthropic giving.

And one more thing: Football season ticket sales, Bjork said, are well above last year's pace. This time in 2012, Ole Miss had sold -- renewed, mainly -- about 7,500 season tickets. This year, that number is 14,500, with 2,800 of them being new season tickets, he said. "And we really haven't started our marketing campaign," he said.